The Darwin Awards 4: Intelligent Design (18 page)

One night, I partied all night at a discotheque with friends. Afterward, we went to a “bar of the king” that was open day and night. Such bars are known for housing thugs and pirates.

We, two men and two women, were sitting at a table drinking vodka and beer when a big, mean-looking man approached the table and started talking shit. He was so intoxicated that the collection of syllables he pronounced could hardly be classified as a language. The girls were annoyed by his presence and—typically—tried to get rid of him by calling him names.

In response, the man seized an empty beer glass (in Belgium, a beer glass is as thick as a normal jar) and bit into it, breaking off a piece. This behavior is common in men who have unresolved frustration and need to show their courage, so we weren’t impressed. But then the man started chewing the glass, and quickly bit off another chunk, chewing and biting until only the very bottom of the glass remained, which he put back on the table.

We stared at the man as he chewed the pieces, and then heard the glass cracking. Some blood came out of his mouth. He then tried to swallow the glass, choked, and spat blood-soaked pieces onto the table. Then he started gargling blood and fell to his knees.

We were too paralyzed by the event to move, but the bartender ran up to help the man. He tried to remove the remaining glass from the man’s mouth, but the man bit the bartender’s finger. I called an ambulance from my cell phone. I don’t know if the man survived. And I really don’t know why he did it. But remember this: If you have an iron stomach, make sure that your throat is iron, too.

Reference: Personal Account

 

R
EADER
C
OMMENT
:

 

“I think he had one jar too many.”

 

 

My friend’s father, Bob, was a volunteer fireman and a home mechanic. He was also a heavy drinker who never seemed to be without booze in his hand. One day I was helping him repair one of their cars. Bob, already well into a six-pack when I arrived, believed that the fuel line was blocked. His solution began with jacking the car up a few feet and draining the twelve gallons of gasoline from the tank.

In the process of disconnecting the fuel line from the tank, gasoline spilled all over Bob, soaking his polyester shirt and flooding the floor of the garage. Bob then used several five-gallon buckets to catch the remaining gasoline that was pouring out of the tank. Although the garage door was open to allow ventilation, the fumes were so thick that my friend and I had to step outside to breathe. Bob continued to lie on the garage floor, in a pool of gasoline under the car.

 

The universal building code requires gas-fired hot-water tanks in garages to be at least eighteen inches off the floor, to prevent accidental combustion of gasoline fumes. Since gasoline fumes are heavy and stay near the floor, eighteen inches is considered a safe height. And it would be, under normal circumstances. But the circumstances in this case were not normal.

 

 

At about that time, the water heater, located about ten feet from gasoline-soaked Bob, kicked on. The entire floor went up in flames, and a large fireball came out the garage door toward us. My friend and I dove to the ground to avoid the flames.

After the initial blast, Bob picked himself up and—reacting as the trained and experienced firefighter he was—grabbed a fire extinguisher and put out the flames. Only then did he realize that his polyester shirt had melted to his now thoroughly burned chest. He refused his wife’s assistance and, despite his inebriated state, drove himself to the local hospital.

Bob lost most of the skin on his chest and most of the hair on his head. He also spent several days in the burn unit, and was ultimately tossed out of the local volunteer fire department.

Reference: George Leavell, Personal Account

My grandfather served for ages in the Royal Navy, and he related this story to me about his time aboard a rivet-hulled diesel-electric submarine. Two men, the ship’s petty officer and an ordinary seaman, were drinking in the mess wardroom. Having cheerfully consumed all the available alcohol (presumably above and beyond the daily ration of rum), the seaman asked the petty officer to do him a favor. He wanted a bullet shot through his hat.

Because a breach in the hull could be deadly to the entire crew, and because a ricocheting bullet would be dangerous to the crew in such close quarters even if it did not puncture the hull, firearms are locked up aboard ship. Nevertheless, the petty officer honored his friend’s request, retrieved a 9 mm Beretta from his locker, and in an alcoholic haze opened fire on the hat, which was still on his friend’s head.

 

At depth, a submarine hull is under pressure, but the atmosphere inside is not. That’s why the crew doesn’t suffer from the “bends” as the submarine submerges and surfaces. This pressure difference makes a breach in the hull very dangerous. If the hull is under ten atmospheres of pressure (at one hundred meters) a breach could fill 90 percent of the interior with water.

 

 

Despite the amount of alcohol consumed, he was pretty much bang on target. Ignoring the ricocheting bullet and the screams as the rest of the crew ducked, the ordinary seaman removed his hat and examined the bullet hole that had pierced it just an inch from his head. “Too far away,” he said. “I want it closer in. Have another shot.” Famous last words. The next bullet creased him along his skull, and hurled him to the floor, bleeding and unconscious.

Both men were tossed out of the Royal Navy.

My grandfather recently told this story to his table during one of those seamen’s dinner-and-dance parties, and was shocked when one man eyed him coldly and informed him that it had been his uncle on the receiving end of the bullet!

Reference: Joshua Sinyor, Personal Account

Some say persistence is a virtue, and in science that is often the case. Great scientists frequently push the edge in their experiments, extending their hypothesis as they prove each successive point. When tests are performed with firecrackers, though, there is the chance that going to extremes can lead to an amateur scientist’s untimely removal from the gene pool.

Two young men, “Einstein” and “Teller,” were at a friend’s house celebrating Independence Day with a little food, a little booze, and many fireworks. Einstein was startled to discover a pack of firecrackers exploding at his feet and looked up to see Teller laughing, lighter still in hand. Einstein yelled, “You’re stupid to throw explosives so close to a human being!”

“Firecrackers can’t hurt you,” said Teller, and to prove his point, he unwrapped another pack, lit its fuse, and dropped it at his own feet. As the firecrackers were popping, he said, “See, no damage!”

They argued and drank and argued and drank. Teller was convinced that his hypothesis was correct: Firecrackers could not hurt people. Einstein remained skeptical. Finally, Teller lit another pack, pulled the elastic band of his boxers forward, and dropped the pack down his underpants.

Before the firecrackers even started exploding, Teller began screaming as the fuse burned his skin. As they began to blow up, he screamed even louder and ran into the house.

Teller took himself to the hospital, and returned with burn ointment and the instruction to lay off work for a week. He refused to reveal the exact results of his experiment to Einstein, except to say that “both the twigs and berries” had been burned. The doctor warned him that his ability to reproduce was thereafter in question.

Reference: Personal Account

Norm Sleep, Science Writer

D
arwin Awards are minor personal catastrophes compared to a recent global catastrophe suffered by the Earth itself. If we don’t protect ourselves from a repeat, the human race will earn an inevitable mass Darwin Award.

Yucatan, early June, sixty-five million years ago

The summer day begins as usual on the shallow reef. Fish and ammonites forage among the vegetation as they try to avoid becoming shark bait. Pterodactyls soar in the trade winds, waiting for tidbits. Suddenly, the sky to the south brightens like a second sunrise. Within seconds, the entire sky glows at white heat. Every mobile organism instinctively dives for cover. But there is no hope for them. One second later, coming in fast and at a low angle, an asteroid fifteen kilometers in diameter crashes to earth at twenty kilometers per second, vaporizing itself and the upper few kilometers of its center of impact. The shock produces a crater as wide as the Mediterranean Sea. A thick blanket of hot rock fragments fries
every living thing within a few hundred kilometers of the crater rim.

 

How do we know when this impact took place? We know the time of year from clues frozen in ponds and preserved in the geological record. The time of day is artistic license, because more goes on during the day than at night.

 

 

The pent-up rock vapor expands, carried rapidly northward by the momentum of the projectile. Within minutes, the vapor cloud sears the surface of western North America, igniting any exposed plant or animal. This is not an ordinary forest fire; the massive heat wave destroys even seeds buried underground.

Several minutes later, across the ocean in Europe and Australia, dawn comes early as ejected sand-sized fragments return to Earth at cosmic velocities. They glow like meteors, filling the sky for hours. Their heat ignites exposed vegetation, leaving surviving animals with nothing to eat. Soot from the fires fills the lower atmosphere, quickly bringing darkness.

The calamity is just beginning. The meteor fragments vaporize into a fine dust that circulates in the upper atmosphere, blotting out sunlight. Sulfate, vaporized from anhydrite beds beneath the Yucatan, contributes to the opaqueness of the stratosphere. It remains in the air longer than the dust. Darkness brings cold after the heat. Lilies freeze in Wyoming ponds. Photosynthesis stops in the open ocean for more than a year. Plankton species perish, along with the creatures in the
food chain above them. Animals not dependent on photosynthesis eke out a living. Survivors include crocodiles in ponds, our insect-eating ancestors in logs, and a species of shore bird—the only remaining dinosaur.

Long before the great asteroid forever changed life on Earth, even worse disasters occurred that make this more recent apocalypse pale, a mere pebble in a pond. Four billion years ago, objects
hundreds
of kilometers in diameter hurtled from the sky, reshaping the planets. These gigantic impacts produced the enormous basins still visible on the Moon and Mars. The heat from the kinetic energy of the projectiles partly vaporized the whole terrestrial ocean. Amazingly, life was able to weather these storms in the “Goldilocks Zone,” which is located in rocks over a kilometer deep, the only safe place for thousands of years after an impact. The surface and shallow subsurface alternately teemed with life, and became a death trap when a large asteroid hit every few ten million years. Both the surface and the deep subsurface were too hot to sustain life. Only heat-loving (thermophilic) organisms in the Goldilocks Zone, living at 100 degrees Centigrade, survived these tribulations to root the tree of life.

Evolution does not directly prepare organisms for conditions they do not regularly experience, like a year of darkness in the tropical ocean. So most organisms are unable to cope with the disastrous results of such freak events. Some adaptations that arose to cope with other environmental conditions, however, provided salvation for a species. For example, in prehuman times the pike evolved sharp teeth for catching and eating its usual diet of smaller fish. Today, these teeth are advantageous for biting through fishing line. Other coincidental adaptations help during rare events. For example, sixty-five
million years ago, when most creatures boiled to death during the great cataclysm, animals and plants that were low on the food chain and nestled deep in swamps managed to survive.

Chicken Little was right—the risk is real!

Your chance of being killed by an asteroid is about the same as in a passenger plane crash: one in a million per year. But with an asteroid, billions of humans will be killed at the same time. How do we avoid the indignity of a mass extinction, with no one left to bury us? Our species possesses one helpful adaptation: our intelligence, which has evolved for hunting, gathering, and social interaction. Unlike dinosaurs, we can observe, predict, and act decisively. Can our smarts save us from an otherwise inevitable tragedy?

Asteroid orbits are predictable in the short run, but over a geological length of time the orbits change. The Earth is a tiny target in the vastness of the solar system. Moreover, earth-crossing orbits are chaotic—a series of minute changes in an asteroid’s actual position and velocity build up to huge changes over time. Thus, in the long term, asteroid orbits are effectively random—more so than even a fair roulette table. We know an asteroid will hit us, sooner or later, but we can’t say which one, or when.

 

Even a fair roulette wheel gives nonrandom results due to mechanical variations. By collecting statistics and betting appropriately, Joseph Jaggers broke the bank at Monte Carlo in 1873, and mathematician Claude Shannon built a wearable computer to outwit the roulette wheel in 1961. Nowadays, casinos regularly rebalance their wheels to keep the spin results as random as possible.

 

 

NASA monitors near-Earth asteroids. Before this program began a few years ago, we did not know whether an impact was more likely next year or a million years from now. Now, visual tracking and heavy mathematics predict the orbits of large objects five hundred years in the future. Early results are in: no ten-kilometer-diameter object has Earth’s name on it. And five centuries from now, society should be better equipped to deal with the hazard of an impending collision. However, the more numerous one-kilometer objects also present a danger of global catastrophe. We do not yet have a complete manifest of these vermin of the sky.

What do we do if we find an asteroid in our path? Civilization will face this calamity sooner or later, certainly within a million years. If we have been diligent, we will have hundreds of years to prepare for an impact. We will be able to soft-land a probe to track the object’s course and confirm the danger of collision. We will probably not choose to blow it up, as that would turn one dangerous object into several. More likely we will change its orbit by detonating a nuclear explosive nearby, to spall off some material. Newton’s law of the conservation of
energy predicts that the equal and opposite force would change the asteroid’s orbital velocity by a few centimeters per second. At that time, there may even be advanced rocket motors with enough power to do the job.

The take-home message is that, thanks to the development of human intelligence and our continually increasing knowledge base, the next time an asteroid threatens to destroy the planet, there’s a good chance that life on Earth will be saved. And even if most life is destroyed, take heart. After another sixty-five million years, the cycle of evolution may lead to another civilization with the ability to protect Earth against these behemoths from outer space.

With that cheerful note of impending doom, let’s delve into those who avoid the problem of asteroid impacts by leaving the gene pool in their own explosive manner….